


6 feet

by doubleDerivative



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Depersonalization, Derealization, Dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Gen, General Discussions of Trauma, OCs are Jon's alters, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Panic Attacks, Police Brutality, based on my own system (with proper consent), forced hospitalization, identity crisis, tw for:, unreality
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:48:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27889294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doubleDerivative/pseuds/doubleDerivative
Summary: "Jon is a man (debatably), a man of sensibilities (also debatably). He does not intend to, and therefore will not, tolerate any discussions of what he does or does not remember, how it could be affecting him, or why it’s so concerning that this note that he apparently wrote has handwriting just adjacent of his regular messy script. Especially not from an assistant who could be doing much more important things and actually making himself useful."In which Jon finds his little problem to be suddenly, very much not small anymore.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32





	6 feet

“Jon, hey, are you listening?” The snapping catches their attention as intended, but they make no effort to move at all, not even their eyes. They don’t want to move their eyes, all they’ll see is more of the blurry, unrecognizable room around them. It’s suffocating, squeezing in on them from every side, and they can’t do anything about it. Someone is talking in front of them, the snapping having to come from somewhere. Or maybe it’s coming from nowhere, and this is nothing, and there’s no one for miles and miles. Maybe they’re the last living being on this planet, passing by the ghosts and memories of those long since gone. Maybe they’re the ghost. The scene shifts, there’s cotton in their ears, and everything has a strange echo to it. The warmth from the earlier room is no longer there, replaced by oppressive cold on all sides, better than the oppressive walls of the room before, they suppose. Someone, or no one, is speaking to them again. They find their hands moving without their permission, a desperate attempt at something they never learned, but soon finding a pad of paper and pen gripped tight in their hands. Whatever they’re writing… they don’t like it, they want it to stop. They don’t want anyone, or no one, to know what’s going on, or isn’t. They fight hard against the pull of their own hands, kicking and screaming the whole way, and something else is shoved into their hands before they can process that they even lost the fight. Colors shift and they find themselves in the suffocating room again, and they so desperately want to reach out, to stretch the room beyond its constraints, to be free.

Jon is a man (debatably), a man of sensibilities (also debatably). He does not intend to, and therefore will not, tolerate any discussions of what he does or does not remember, how it could be affecting him, or why it’s so concerning that this note that he apparently wrote has handwriting just adjacent of his regular messy script. Especially not from an assistant who could be doing much more important things and actually making himself useful. It’s easy enough to wave off Martin with empty promises and hollow excuses, but the problem sinks deeper into his stomach when he leaves. He’s spent his whole life up to this point filling in his own gaps just fine, chalking incidents up to poor memory and lack of concentration, but to have it so thoroughly interrupt his work causes more than some alarm in the back of his mind. And to say that his described behaviour was… strange... would be a gross understatement.

He returns to his work, determined to finish recording by the end of the day, only to find his mind continually drifting, unable to detach from his flimsy reasonings as to why this was perfectly normal. He did remember having an awful headache on Monday, later in the day when his assistants had left, so perhaps he had a bout of a migraine, and his behavioural issue and memory loss was nothing to truly worry about. It’s not an uncommon experience, after all, so why should he be worried. His brain only accepts that answer for so long, before moving onto its own ideas, chattering on about pointlessly about inane disorders and diseases. Nothing more than his severely understimulated brain searching for anything and everything to latch onto. He gets distracted arguing with himself about the effectiveness of psychiatrists, looking to all the world like he was pointedly ignoring the man standing tentatively in the threshold of his office, who tries to clear his throat lightly to get Jon’s attention. Right.

“Can I help you?” he asks, with not as much bite as he feels he’s owed.

“Just thought you should know you’re talking to yourself extra loud today,” Martin replies sheepishly, fiddling idly with the cuffs of his shirt. Jon huffs like an aggravated bull, then decides to humour his wayward thoughts.

“Does your brain ever reply in a different voice when you think something especially… loud?” Jon asks, losing his composure slightly at the end. Martin looks like he just got kicked in the stomach by a horse, but recovers in time.

“N-No, I don’t believe so? All of my thoughts sound… the same? Are you alright?” Martin takes a step toward him, and he presses himself into the back of his chair, careful not to actually move it. Being respectful of distance and being rude are two different things, after all.

“Right. The migraine, I think. I’ll quiet down,” he adds, intent on returning to his papers. Martin doesn’t move for a while, but eventually, after being purposefully pointedly ignored this time, exits swiftly.

Jon’s hands are beginning to go numb from holding the pen the way he was when a dull pressure begins building at the back of his head, clouding his vision and setting a ringing to his ears. Settling into a familiar detached apathy, they feel their limbs begin to move as they wished, grabbing for the fidget cube stashed in the bottom drawer and beginning to mess with it idly. Their eyes return themselves to the page, though the words look foreign and strange to them, jumbles of letters floating helplessly through the mess of soup and puddy their brain felt like. How strange, they think, that they continue to pretend to read when it will ultimately be pointless from this point, but their eyes proceed to scan the characters littered across the lines against their better judgement, but they decide not to fight it. They register one hand pressing gently into their forehead, just blocking where the hallway light shone in with an unnatural brightness.

“Behave now, you’ll make me sick with all that energy,” someone coos at them, but they know the venom seeping from its fangs mean only to harm. They want to flinch, they so badly want to move away from the monster sat perfectly content in front of them, they want to blink first. It hurt to keep the scream and the bile and the anger down, they so very badly wanted to be angry, wanted to let that feeling wash over them for once. But the moment is gone, and they find something else in front of them, a muddled mass of reds and browns and greys. Someone, then. They’re reminded that this is a problem, no doubt, but they refuse to do anything about it, they’ve been doing it this way for years, why should they care what some… someone thinks about the way they work. They buzz with an anxious anger resting just beneath the surface, but empty promises bubble from their lips anyway, and they can return to the white noise of the room around them. It’s not a problem simply because they say it isn’t so.

If Martin refused to stop badgering him today of all days, he may, well… Jon was more concerned as to why today felt significant. It was just any other day, as far as he could tell, no anniversaries that he could put a name to or anything else of the sort, but the entire day left him feeling raw. As he walked, the air surrounding himself felt thick with his own tension, radiating off of him in waves he may drown in. He lets out a deep, pointed sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose, pressing the folders in his arms tight to his body as if it could shield him from his situation.

“Martin, please,” he warns, swiftly turning and corner and not allowing the other man time to catch up.

“I’m just concerned is all, Jon, you’ve been acting so weird lately and I don’t even want to think about what could be causing it,” Martin stresses, lengthening his stride to keep up with Jon’s small yet quick one. He stops abruptly, teeth bared with no real threat.

“I’ll tell you what,” his voice escapes through clenched teeth, higher than normal. He swallows the other words that feel foreign to him that threatened their way through his throat and pushed his own out.

“Today is not a good day, and I don’t want to talk about it,” he states clearly, grabbing the handle of his office door, prepared to shut it as quickly as possible and lock out as much as he could. Martin gave a defeated sigh and muttered something, but ultimately gave up his pursuit in order to return to his own desk. All Jon wanted to do, desperately do, was crawl under his desk and bask in the darkness for a while, let his brain come back to its regular volume, but doing so would be unprofessional. So he simply sits, running a hand through his hair and picking through the statements that he had laid out before he’d left the office. Productivity will certainly push him through the weird feelings flowering in his chest.

After a substantial amount of pushing down and focusing intently on his surroundings, his brain eventually returns to drone idly on about coding and 32-bit integers and the integrity of modern computer science. Brief flashes of an elective class he took for a semester in university enter his mind before he can question where he even learned half of the things his brain finds oh so interesting at the moment. He pinches the bridge of his nose with a sigh, tired of the drivel, and is luckily saved from his own thoughts by footsteps approaching his door, which swings open unceremoniously. He pretends not to jump when it hits the wall with force.

“What?” he groans at the man now leaning casually against the frame, before his brain reminds him to be polite. He clears his throat.

“I’ll level with you,  _ boss _ ,” the smirk Tim gets on his face whenever he decides to put extra emphasis on the word drives him up a wall, “Martin is worried about you and won’t give it a rest, so I took it upon myself to check on you.”

“I’m fine, truly, just a bit of a migraine,” Jon tries to wave him off, but the man is determined.

“Ah, getting those again, then?” Tim tilts his head. 

"Yes, I am, and you don't need to coddle me about it," Jon states flatly, desperately wishing he would leave. He doesn't so much as flinch at Jon's tone, and he wants to scream in frustration. The thick books lining the walls would probably muffle it well enough. Tim hums and pulls a face, before settling back into his usual lackadaisy charm.

"How's the old memory doing nowadays?" he jokes half-heartedly, but it falls flat to Jon.

"You don't need to chide me," he hisses through gritted teeth, and this time Tim does flinch.

"Not my intention. It was genuine," he clarifies, smile wavering. Jon just gives a deep sigh in response, rubbing at his temples. He can feel the pressure beginning to build at the base of his skull again, and he thinks he may have said something, or maybe Tim did, but it sounded detached from himself nonetheless. When the pressure subsides and he bothers to look back up, Tim, for his part, looks contemplatively mournful, giving him these ridiculously pitying eyes. Her fists clench, but she swallows down the urge pressing hard against her skull to get him to leave. She so very desperately just wants to hide away and be left to her own deteriorating mental health, but she knows she needs the help where she can get it. Something dawns on her violently as the tears welling in her eyes begin to spill.

"I don't—" she chokes, voice cracking high pitched, "I don't know what's going on."

Tim pales instantly, taking hesitant steps toward her… him? Everything has a fuzzy edge to it, including herself, and the ringing in her ears fills the silence she didn't realize disturbed her before. He stops inches from her desk, and she doesn't realize her breath has gone shallow until he takes a few exaggerated deep breaths to demonstrate, though she can't understand what he's trying to say through the fog encompassing her head.

"I feel like Jon, but I don't feel like Jon. I feel like nothing and everything at the same time," the words hang from her lips disgustingly like spittle. She doesn't want to dump to her coworker all of her struggles, but her vocal chords conspire against her. He says something in response, but she wills her tongue to lock up, to stop the spill of her words then and there, to just. Please. Stop. The tears still spill out of her eyes with an ungodly sting, trailing hot and messy down her cheeks, and she decides that hiding under her desk might not be such a bad idea. Everything around her blurs when she settles, knees pressed against her chest and heart pounding violently against her ribs, threatening to force its way out if she couldn't figure out why she felt this way. Flashes of overly bright light overtook her eyes, and she rubbed at them violently to make it go away, but it was almost blinding, and she couldn't stop the tears from coming harder. She just wanted it to stop, why couldn't it stop? She just wanted someone to listen to her. 

But no one did, and a cool apathy took over as the light faded.


End file.
